Patients today want value for money: Dr S Narayani

Good quality services become as much essential as clinical quality and clinical outcomes. Both need to go hand in hand and healthcare organisation need to be as conscious about good services as they are about clinical quality.Shahid Akhter | ETHealthWorld | Updated: February 25, 2017, 05:31 IST

How do you think there has been a change in patient's attitude towards the doctor?

Today a patient has high level of expectations from a hospital and there is tremendous expectation in terms of clinical quality of care, where a patient expects that the best is offered to him.

All the various aspects as well as the curative part of the treatments are available to him under one roof. It is a multidisciplinary approach that a patient needs and various options are discussed with him. The patient is given tremendous education and made a partner in decision making. Finally it is delivered with the best infrastructure by the best clinical talent to ensure good quality outcomes.

In today’s scenario patients are aware and they want value of what they have spent. There is more of awareness and education. I won’t say that services are more important than clinical quality but rather clinical quality is a given for patients nowadays. No longer are we in times where a patient is happy to go back with just good clinical quality and is willing to ignore poor quality services.

Good quality services become as much essential as clinical quality and clinical outcomes. Both need to go hand in hand and healthcare organisation need to be as conscious about good services as they are about clinical quality.

What are the challenges that you see?

Every patient comes with a problem which is dealt with multiple specialties. For a patient it might be one problem but in terms of solving the issue and diagnosis, it is split into multiple specialties. In the process we have various levels of communications, we have various levels of discussion so sometimes one phase that the patient could relate to is missing and it often does become a problem.

Though a multidisciplinary consult is a kind of value added preposition and we still need to make sure that there is one person who leads the team, the person who is responsible for the patient and holds the patient through the entire process.

Transplant is a very viable treatment option today for people with kidney, liver and heart problems. We have skills sets in the country for patient to avail of this treatment, however in several cases these treatments are not available due to lack of data availability and especially in cases of heart transplant the only way somebody can survive is when there is a donor organ which is a cadaver donor.

There are high numbers of recipients with very few numbers of organs available and this is because of our poor level of organ donation. The organ donation awareness is very well developed in the southern part of the country and there is an immense need to improve organ donation awareness.

What are your views on the Indian healthcare scenario?

In our country, we have excellent facilities, excellent doctors and very good medical care available at very optimal cost. It needs to be promoted as a medical tourism destination.

Tell us about the CSR initiatives undertaken by Fortis.

The hospital undertakes several CSR initiatives. It is diverse in nature as there are some which are purely in the area of clinical excellence. For instance, we do a lot of work in the community with pediatric patients who suffer from cardiac diseases. We take up these cases and about 40-50 cases are operated by us every month. We are also into community education and our save water initiative has picked up momentum which we have taken up with various societies in the community.

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